The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches — Chapter no 12

CHAPTER TWELVE

think we’re supposed to go that way,” Mika said, pointing left with one hand while holding her phone up with the other. It was almost impossibleI to get a proper look at the screen with the sharp winter sun’s glare bouncing off it. “The map says it’s—”

“I see it!” Ian said. “Oh, how darling.”

The bookshop was indeed rather darling. The shopfront was bright and colourful, obviously decorated with children in mind, and there were painted illustrations of unicorns, sea monsters, and fairies all over the interior whitewashed walls. It was a weekday afternoon in November, so schools around the city had only just finished for the day and the shop was still relatively quiet.

Inside, the bookshop was lovely and inviting. It was very clean, and Mika caught a faint whiff of lemon antibacterial spray (kids, of course, being veritable hotbeds of germs), but it was also delightfully untidy. Books and cushions were all over the place, stacked in wobbly piles and scattered higgledy-piggledy, and someone had left a box of crayons strewn across the rug. Jamie winced slightly, like he felt he’d just walked into the chaotic hellscape of his darkest nightmares, but Mika suspected that the shop was supposed to be messy. This way, a child coming in wouldn’t be intimidated by perfectly ordered shelves and untouchably pristine books.

A middle-aged white woman smiled warmly at them from behind the till. “Lovely afternoon, isn’t it?” she said, abiding by that ancient and most sacred British law of only ever starting a conversation with a comment on the weather.

After chatting with her for a moment, Ian made a beeline for the one shelf crammed with books for grown-ups, almost all of which were

romance novels (“Perfect!” Ian said blissfully), and it took Rosetta less than five seconds to peel herself from Jamie’s side and race over to the brightly coloured spines of a mystery series she’d recently fallen in love with.

So passed a peaceful thirty minutes. Mika wandered around the different sections of the little shop, dividing her attention between finding books the younger girls would like and keeping a watchful eye on the mischievous gold dust that had gathered around Rosetta.

Jamie approached her after a while, a crease between his eyebrows.

“Will you be okay keeping an eye on Rosetta if I go out for a few minutes?

I’ll only be round the corner.”

Mika could see he was frustrated. He didn’t trust her (yet, she hoped), but wherever he planned to go, it had to be important or else she was quite sure he wouldn’t have dreamed of leaving Rosetta with her. If Ian hadn’t been there, too, he probably wouldn’t have.

“Go,” she said sunnily. “We’ll be fine.”

He hesitated a moment longer, his eyes on the back of Rosetta’s tight black curls, and then left with a brusque nod.

Mika turned her attention back to her young companion and dispelled an especially enthusiastic cloud of gold dust with a wave of her hand. Magic meant well, but it did so want to be used and it had an irksome habit of taking matters into its own hands if witches didn’t take the hint.

She and Rosetta were poring over the mysteries when Ian approached them, puzzled. “Where’s our handsome escort?”

“He said he had to pop out for a few minutes,” she replied.

“Did he?” Ian looked taken aback, and more than a little inquisitive.

“Maybe he went to say hello to that friend of his who works in the pub.

Stephen? Sam? Something with an S. No, I’m quite sure Stephen-or-Sam doesn’t work on Thursdays. Hmm . . .”

He continued in this vein for a moment, pondering the mystery of Jamie’s whereabouts to an audience who paid absolutely no attention to him. Then he abruptly switched gears and chuckled.

“How interesting.” His voice brimmed with humour. “I mentioned a handsome someone and you immediately assumed I was referring to

Jamie.”

Mika gave him a frosty look, incredibly irked by the fact that her cheeks were reddening. “We all know what he looks like, so there’s no need to act like something momentous just happened.”

“Someone’s tes-ty,” Ian commented, raising his eyebrows at Rosetta, who giggled.

Mika stomped off, but only to a pile of beanbags by the comic books, where two boys about Rosetta’s age, in navy blue jumpers with school crests, were examining the cover of one book in particular.

“Rosetta?” she called back. “Isn’t this the sequel to the comic you were reading earlier this week?”

One of the boys looked up. “Did you finish it already?” he asked Rosetta. “We haven’t yet, so don’t give us any spoilers, but is the ending as good as everyone says?”

Rosetta’s eyes widened in abject terror, and Ian nudged her gently in the boys’ direction. “Um, yes,” she said, in little more than a mumble. “It’s really good. You’ll want to have the sequel right there so you can start it as soon as you finish the first one.”

“I just want to know if Captain Chaos got the Spear of Fate,” the other

boy said. “Did she?”

“Zaf! No spoilers!”

Zaf made a face at his friend and waved Rosetta over. “Say it really

quietly so Billy can’t hear you.”

“Zaf!”

Rosetta was smiling now, and her voice was louder and clearer as she said, “You have to read it yourself. It’s honestly so worth it!”

And that was it. In seconds, Rosetta was on the pile of beanbags with the two boys, arguing passionately about whether someone called Juniper Joy (a name that, improbably, was somehow even more twee than Mika Moon) deserved to win the Tournament of Fifteen Crowns.

“Is this what it feels like to be incredibly, absurdly proud of someone?”

Mika said to Ian in an undertone.

He patted her fondly on the arm. “It does indeed, my dear. You should go

get Jamie. He’ll want to see this.”

“Can’t you text him?”

“He never checks his texts,” said Ian blithely, which sounded to Mika like an outright lie.

“Okay, but if someone has to go fetch him, shouldn’t it be you? I have to keep an eye on, you know, the magic.”

“I’m an old man, Mika!” Ian tutted. “I can’t go traipsing up and down the city!”

Mika scoffed but relented. She glanced once more at Rosetta, just to make doubly sure that the shimmer of power gathered around her was completely in check, and then darted out the bookshop door.

Of course, as soon as she’d made her way down the narrow, twisty cobblestone street and turned the corner, she stopped short because she didn’t actually have any idea where Jamie was.

She was just about to turn right around and go back to the bookshop when the door of an old, narrow, two-storey brick office opened and Jamie came out, his brows furrowed. He shut the door with unwonted force.

The angry look on his face didn’t budge when he spotted her. “What are you doing out here?”

Mika glanced at the sign above the door behind him. The words SOLICITORS LTD stood out. “Have you been to see Edward?”

“What?” He gave her an odd look, as if her question had come out of left field. Then he glanced behind him and sighed. “Oh. No. Edward works in London.”

So he’d been to see a different solicitor, then. Mika was unaccountably curious, but a voice at the back of her mind piped up, reminding her that it was not considered good manners to ask someone why they’d been to see a solicitor.

She opened her mouth to tell him what Rosetta was up to, but what came out instead was: “You’ve committed a crime, haven’t you?”

Jamie stopped in his tracks.

“Oh, good God,” Mika went on, quite unable to stop the words. “Is it murder? It is, isn’t it?”

“You’ve been spending too much time with Terracotta,” Jamie said severely. “Murder is not the answer to every question.”

Mika found herself collapsing into laughter even as red-hot colour stained her cheeks. “God, I’m fucking ridiculous.”

All her life, she had been prone to what Primrose had called very irregular ideas. It had not been a compliment. And, really, Mika was starting to think Primrose may have been on to something. Upon encountering a man leaving the office of a solicitor, a regular person would surely have jumped to it must have something to do with money and not, instead, to the more outlandish a murder has clearly been committed and the police will be knocking at the door any minute now.

Jamie’s face was expressionless, but there was something perilously like a smile in his eyes as he said, “You are fucking ridiculous, yes.”

“So,” she said sheepishly, “At this point, I feel like I have to ask why you’ve been to see a solicitor.”

He cut her an exasperated look, but said, “I had a question about my dad’s will.”

“Oh.” Mika felt terrible. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know your dad had died.”

“Don’t worry about it. I was twelve when he died.”

Now Mika was more confused than ever, but it really wasn’t her place to keep prying. “I never knew either of my parents,” she said instead, relieved to find that her mouth was saying the right words this time. “You know that, of course, on account of the witch thing.”

“I assume Primrose was the closest thing you had.”

Mika choked on a laugh. “I’ve told you how I grew up. Primrose did exceedingly little parenting.”

“But she’s important to you, isn’t she? She and the other witches in your Society? If push came to shove, they’d still have your loyalty?”

“Of course,” said Mika. “If we can’t count on each other, who can we count on?” She cocked her head to one side, considering him. “Was that your way of asking if I’m going to tell them about the girls?”

“It wasn’t subtle,” he admitted.

“Not even a little.” She smiled. “No, I’m not going to tell them. That would be interfere-y and Primrose-ish of me, and I’d rather not be either of those things. And anyway, even if there was no chance of Primrose trying to convince Lillian to separate the kids if she were to find out about them, I don’t see what the point would be in telling any of the other witches.” She thought about that for a moment. “I suppose if Lillian refused to come back from South America to recast her wards in the spring, I’d want to tell them.

I think it would be too risky to raise three young witches in one place without wards.”

“You couldn’t cast the spell?” He looked away, suddenly interested in something in the middle distance. “If you were still at Nowhere House in the spring, that is.”

“No, Lillian’s wards are incredibly powerful. I’d need a few other witches to cast the spell with me. But the girls tell me that Lillian always comes back in time, or close to it, so it shouldn’t be a problem.” Mika felt the edges of her mouth curl up in an irrepressible smile. “You think I might still be at Nowhere House in the spring?”

The faintest hint of colour streaked across the tops of his ears. “I didn’t say that.” He turned abruptly away, one hand clenching and unclenching into a fist at his side. “We should go.”

“If you’re lucky, we’ll be back in time to see Rosetta with her new friends.”

“Yeah, about that,” Jamie said, his voice clipped. “Remind me why you left her alone?”

“Bite my head off, why don’t you,” Mika said, deploying a voice so sunny and sweet, she hoped it gave him a toothache. “She’s not alone, and I’ve only been gone five minutes.”

“Sorry.” He raked a hand over the top of his dark blond hair. “Was she okay when you left her?”

“She was neck-deep in a comic book with two fellow fans. She seemed a bit nervous when they started talking to her, but she’d pretty much forgotten Ian and I were there when I left.”

The stormy grey of his eyes softened to something warmer. Then, as they walked back down the twisty street, he absently put himself between her and the icy wind coming from the left.

It was impossible to stay cross with him after that.

Of course, it was also a little difficult to maintain the moral high ground when, upon getting back to the bookshop, they found Ian and Rosetta waiting outside with a stack of torn books and rather sheepish expressions on their faces.

“There may or may not have been a small cyclone,” Ian informed them.

“But not to worry, it’s gone now and semi-convincing explanations have been offered. We are, however, in possession of six largely unreadable books because it seemed only polite to buy the books that were ripped apart.”

“I maybe lost my temper a bit when Billy said he hoped Captain Chaos never got the Spear of Fate back,” Rosetta explained.

Mika didn’t dare look at Jamie, whose voice was studiously even as he said, “Did Billy survive the cyclone?”

“He didn’t even notice it!” Rosetta said. “It was only a tiny cyclone.”

Jamie considered her. “Did you have fun?”

“So much fun,” she said, her sheepish, anxious expression dissolving into an enormous smile.

Jamie shrugged. “In that case, a cyclone seems like a reasonable price to pay.”

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